Should Medical Journals Inform Readers if a Book Reviewer can’t be Objective?

At the end of last week’s post I suggested that book reviewer Donald Abrams and the New England Journal of Medicine had withheld information useful for evaluating Abrams’ review: that he is the Secretary/Treasurer of the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO), the organization of which Lorenzo Cohen, the first editor of the book that Abrams reviewed,* is President. I also promised to look at material from the book and from the Society’s website in order to discover “data that will allow even the most conventional oncologists to appreciate [the value of ‘integrative’ methods].”

There is little question that Abrams and Cohen know each other, or at least that Abrams couldn’t have been expected to write an entirely objective review of Cohen’s book. Abrams is the Program Chair for the Society’s upcoming 5th International Conference, sponsored by the American Cancer Society. He and Cohen will be sharing the stage for the “Intro/Welcome.” Does it matter that most NEJM readers wouldn’t have learned of this association by reading the review? Probably not, in the case of readers who are well-versed in the misleading language of “CAM.”

I believe that most readers of medical journals are not so sophisticated. Otherwise, how could it have been so easy for “CAM” literature to seep through the usual evaluative filters, not only in medical schools and government but in the editorial boardrooms of prestigious journals? For anyone from the Journal who might be following this thread, Dr. Sampson’s satirical but deadly serious account of “how we did it” is obligatory reading.

Do “Integrative Oncology” Methods have Value?

Now let’s take a look at what Dr. Cohen’s book and the SIO are up to. The book’s introduction and table of contents are available on Amazon.com. The introduction contains the usual, misleading assertions and falsehoods that are ubiquitous in “CAM” promotions. I’ve added a few hyperlinks: